Why is my old comp working so nice?

[RancidWAnnaRIot]

Riddle me this.

A couple of years ago i had this old gateway, this was before I got interested in actually building my own computer. Anyway, after about two years this gate was horrifically slow. My guess is it was slow due to just nasty software clutter from win 98 and perhaps spyware and junk from the internet. But i did take care of it, i defraged regularly, I did my best to prevent and get rid of internet junk, also i even tweaked win 98 a bit, but still it was horrifically slow, especially at boot up.

For example i remember boot up would take no more than like 30 - 40 seconds. But later in it's life ( about two years) it grew to like 5 minutes to boot up.

Now i'm on this box that i built, it's about two year old, and i haven't upgraded anything, but it works just as good as the first day i built it, Boot ups are still fast.

My question is why? i mean i took care of both computers pretty much the same. Why did my gateway get so cluttered with software junk (at least that's what i think happened)

Any of you can answer me that?

Thanks

 

[Dem]

Different operating systems?

No matter how careful I was to not clutter up win98 or to 'tweak' it, it always got slower and less stable as time went on --though nowhere near to the degree you're talking about .

Erik

 

[Zepher]

I've got an old P2 450 with 256megs and Win98SE at the office and it still runs just as good now as the day I built it.
It's still running the original Win98SE install I put on there back in June of 99. It has never crashed while I used it. It's primary use is Photoshop and printing 8x10 color laserprints from digital photos.

 

[theNoid]

Win98SE > Win98. That may be part of the problem to begin with.